Thread by @eriktorenberg

A fascinating piece looking at the rise of “wokeness” and comparing the extreme parts of it to something resembling a post-modern religion.

areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/pos…

Here is a summary:

(This entire tweetstorm paraphrases & quotes the article, so do read the full thing.)

Disclaimers:

"I'm not saying that religion is bad and therefore Social Justice is bad because it’s so much like a religion. That is not my argument.”

On the contrary, religions (both pre- & post-modern) provided what secularism couldn’t--meaning-making and community at scale.

What the piece IS saying, then, is:

"Whether or not it’s a religion, it is certainly religion-like enough to treat in a way that’s similar to how we should treat religions—that is, we should approach them with an attitude generally associated with secularism"

More on this later

First, What is Social Justice or "Wokeness" exactly?

The piece describes it as “applied most modernism”, and says it has these core axioms:

1/ Knowledge and truth are largely socially constructed, not objectively discovered.

2/ What we believe to be “true” is in large part a function of social power: who wields it, who’s oppressed by it, how it influences what we hear

3/ Power is oppressive & zero-sum

4/ Thus, most claims about supposedly objective truth are actually power plays or justifications

In short, those who hold the power can and do structure language—referred to as discourses, which are ways of speaking about things—so that their truths, which are subjective, are mistakenly treated as the truth, which is objective.

Postmodernism carries forward an article of faith in the form of relativism too: it professes to believe that there is no reason to privilege any one set of culturally mediated truths over any other, & so the truths of any group may be as valid (read: true) as those of any other

This is why postmodern initiatives like SJ are so interested in finding ways to forward “other ways of knowing” and the “truths” of oppressed groups, which they believe are less recognized only because they have been on the short end of a power dynamic of oppression

So: How is Wokeness/SJ like religion?

Religions provide purpose

In some religions, this purpose might be to establish a relationship w/ God or to build utopia here on Earth. In Social Justice, the telos in play is remaking society according to the moral vision of Social Justice

Religions provide moral identity in the form of moral tribes

They provide a framework through which a person can feel good about her- (or him)self (both in terms of how she sees herself & how she perceives being seen by others) and a community in which that framework makes sense

Once you go deeper, the parallels become striking

There’s almost a 1:1 mapping for virtually every concept up to & including being “saved” aka becoming “woke”.... even ”woke” is a nod to genesis, becoming aware of the difference been good (social justice) and evil (oppression)

Scripture:

Grievance studies scholarship is the Bible and the Hadith of Social Justice.

Which makes the scholars the priests, and the universities their cathedrals, both working in concert to protect sacred knowledge

(More on this later)

Prayer:

"Wokeness prayers are achieved through the act of Social Justice prayer, which primarily takes the form of making woke social media posts… a way to offer a blessing to the wokeness gods so that discourses might be blessed, and problematics & dissenters might be shamed"

Original sin: Privilege & Oppression

Intersectionality turns everyone into oppressors. Almost everyone an oppressor on at least one dimension. White gay man is white & male. A cishet asian female is heterosexual. Anyone who is upper class has privilege.

Sacred Knowledge:

Nearly every faith tradition has a canon which it considers a repository of special knowledge, which are effectively set aside from rational inquiry, resulting in an expectation for them to be understood mythologically rather than literally or scientifically

One sacred belief in Wokism is Blank Slatism:

The belief that cognitively and psychologically, all human beings are born largely identically, with minds like “blank slates” upon which can be written all the myriad modes and manners of human expression.

Where, for some of the religious, we are children of God, fashioned in His divine image, for Social Justice, we are children of society, fashioned by its social constructions and the power dynamics they maintain.

Religions have enemies (e.g the devil)

For SJ, this Enemy becomes “Hate,” and Hate is everywhere and never-ending—racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, and on and on and on—and it is expressed in Hate speech, which perpetuates and legitimizes it

For SJ, like in religions, the work is never done. There is not even a "next year in Jerusalem". Hate is everywhere and eternal.

The work is never finished — both societally (reduce all bigotry) and personally (cleanse yourself of your privilege)

Like other religions, SJ police their memberships. Not only that, if anything at all characterizes the various species of the SJ moral tribes, it is that they also do this to outsiders. This has been called “call-out culture"

Christianity reordered nobility structures

SJ sees society as being subject to a Matrix of Domination in which power & privilege oppress marginalized folks

In SJ, victimhood becomes sacred & raises one’s divine standing, & so the victim is provided w a kind of living sainthood

Decentralized nature of SJ mimics Protestant Christianity.

No central authority.

Any Protestant can interpret the Bible as she will, and any Social Justice devotee can problematize aspects of society in an attempt to remake it in the hopes of greater Justice.

The SJ approach to salvation is closer to Calvinism:

In Calvinist theology, salvation is reserved only for the Elect, who are the exceedingly few predetermined by God to be saved (through Irresistible Grace) and thus to go to Heaven.

In SJ, true salvation is hard to come by for anyone who's part of an oppressive group

Mimics Calvinism, which insists that humans are so corrupted not just by (original) sin but by the desire to sin, that we cannot even choose righteousness (God) no matter how we want Him

Note, haven't said cult.

Religions institutionalize, cults don't.

This is because cults are often maintained in service to an individual (and, perhaps, his or her peculiar beliefs) whose ambitions are, for whatever internal reasons, to gain personal power over a devoted group

SJ is no exception to the trend of seeking to institutionalize its belief structure.

But it started out in the universities, the pinnacle institutions for creating, legitimizing, and passing on knowledge.

Religions in secular sociopolitical environments are forced to treat their beliefs as beliefs. SJ has arranged things such that it can treat its beliefs as knowledge

The result is that this makes SJ much harder to challenge from the outside than religions

In this way, it creeps into other institutions, including primary and secondary education and any portions of media, the corporate world, and politics that are susceptible to it.

"The biggest lessons learned over the last two thousand years is the lesson that a free society depends upon preventing the institutional power of a moral tribe (to generalize a bit) from gaining state power—this is of the utmost importance to any free society."

"This is because moral tribes are often punitive where it comes to policing their tribes’ moral norms and expectations—that is, they’re inherently bent toward the totalitarian"

“Specifically, we call the resistance to the intertwining of religious institutions and state institutions secularism, which is a point we will return to at the end of this essay, when we might what to do with regard to Social Justice going forward”

"Ultimately, to put it formally, these efforts make various unwarranted metaphysical claims (specifically, ontological ones such as that God exists or that our total potential understanding of reality is ultimately subjective & constructed by language used in service to power)"

"Religions have used "tricks" to avoid scientific scrutiny:

The premodern tricks for this are to assert that “skeptical faith” is still faith and to insist that all knowledge is, itself, rooted in the Deity, & thus to speak of knowledge at all is to acknowledge God's existence"

The postmodern trick for doing this is to claim that what we consider knowledge is just one knowledge amongst many and particularly one that is culturally situated within white, masculine, Western, and other “dominant” ways of knowing, which actively exclude other ways.

Ultimately, to put it another way, for premodernists all knowledge is rooted in God, and for postmodernists all knowledge is intrinsically tied up with the Matrix of Domination.

So much of it is tied to identity--and who gets to call the shots.

The the privileged possess only the perspective of the privileged while the oppressed perceive both the perspectives of the privileged and of the oppressed, which gives them an epistemological advantage.

It becomes impossible for a critic with any dominant identity to prove that his criticisms aren’t blinded by his identity-limited perspective.

Just like your sin prevents you from accessing the special knowledge of the faith, your power and privilege in society do the same.

"Astute readers will recognize that Karl Marx picked up and ran with the same idea in an economic context, which creates certain parallels between Marxism and Social Justice"

Religions form antibodies to criticism.

In Reformed Epistemology, if you doubt the existence of this alleged God sensor, it is posited that yours merely fails to work because of your sin or, somewhat less cheerfully, your depravity—i.e. because you subconsciously want to sin.

It should go without saying that the vast majority of priests (& scholars) are sincere. Indeed, most are among the most painfully sincere ppl one could potentially meet & are true believers in the moral ideology they serve

And they do great work! Bonafide progress for humanity

Also goes without saying that every religious tradition eventually attracts faith grifters, who are not sincere and may not even be believers. These are opportunists who exploit undercritical belief in a (moral) ideology for their own selfish purposes.

SJ is not immune from grifters:

Since SJ is focused on identifying and purging sin from the world that it is straightforward for any Social Justice faith grifter to accuse her (or his) accusers of being intentional or unwitting agents of oppression

The purpose of saying SJ is like a religion is not to denigrate it (or celebrate it) it’s to put it in context —

"We should have serious concerns and discomfort about institutionalizing its beliefs in any space that isn’t wholly devoted to them."

Secularism:

1/ general reticence toward institutionalizing the ideology of any moral tribe in any public space.

2/ protecting moral ideology and recognizing it as a matter of private conscience (i.e tolerance for all!)

“Public institutions like public universities, being public, should be hesitant to implement SJ initiatives. Private institutions, like corporations & private universities, can make their own choices on the matter & accept the benefits & consequences of openly aligning w/ SJ."

Interested in hearing counter-arguments to this thread (bad faith tweets will be blocked)

I don't agree w/ a few claims here, but the concept of secularism is worth pondering IMO

Q: Secularism itself, however, seems to be "Christianity w/o Christ", so where does that leave us?